Two centers for climate change research to follow up the initiative of the NCCR-Climate

The Oeschger Centre focuses mainly on interdisciplinary research:

• the climate system with the different interactive components in oceans, continents and in the atmosphere
• energy fluxes and bio-geochemical cycles (e.g. water, carbon and greenhouse gases) from global to local scales
• long-term climate and environmental dynamics (Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology) from the late Pleistocene, Holocene, and the present to the near future
• the interaction of climate and environmental changes with the economy and society, in particular the economics of climate change as well as the consequences of extreme events on the economy and society

The Oeschger Centre also trains young scientists. The Graduate School of Climate Sciences offers a specialised, internationally oriented Masters degree in climate sciences.
The Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) of the climate research community in the Zurich area was founded in 2008 and will foster climate research, refine and exploit a hierarchy of climate and climate-related models, conduct analysis of climate data sets, and prepare for the use of the next generations of high-performance computers. The Center's overarching and integrating theme is «multi-scale interactions within the climate system», and it addresses the space-time characteristics of the climate system including its atmospheric, hydrological, oceanographic and terrestrial components.
The Center is a joint venture involving researchers from the ETH and partner institutions (currently MeteoSwiss, Empa and ART).
The two centers guarantee that the core competence of the NF funded National Centre of Competence in Research on Climate (NCCR Climate) is guarded at the end of its phase in 2012.